Infusion solution bags and other medical solution containers are often stored for months and even years after initial manufacture before they are ultimately put to use at a healthcare facility. It is known that during these lengthy periods of time, given the semi-permeable nature of the bag material, air enters the bag and results in a slow inflation, or ballooning, of the bag. The air ingress can be as little as none to complete inflation of the bag within six months, depending on the container material and length of period in storage.
The precise mechanism for ballooning is not well understood but it is known to interfere with bag function both in terms of causing storage difficulty and over-pressurization of the bag. Prior to their use at healthcare facilities, solution bags are removed from the manufacturer's packaging and stored temporarily while awaiting patient use or further processing. A solution bag that has inflated during storage in the manufacturer's packaging can sometimes be cumbersome to remove as well as awkward to stack and store.
Additionally, ballooning can over-pressurize the bag and in some situations impair normal solution flow during use of the bag with a patient. While some technologies that receive the solution bag have built-in pressure controllers to control the solution flow from the bag, many technologies that receive the bag do not include such features.
This known problem of air ingress has been resolved in the art in two ways: 1) incorporation of an overpouch or additional layer that surrounds the solution bag, or 2) selection of an alternate bag material that alleviates the air ingress issue.
Incorporating an overpouch or additional layer may add time, cost, and resources to the manufacturing process and using alternate bag materials with optimized permeability can potentially be cost-prohibitive in certain circumstances. Therefore, there exists a real need for a solution that addresses the air ingress problem while allowing the use of lower cost materials, including materials that could not be used on their own in the past due to the ballooning issues.